Transcript
Narrator:
Welcome to 9 0 9 Exec, your source for wit and wisdom and cybersecurity and beyond. On this podcast, your host, veteran chief security officer and Cyber Aficionado Den Jones taps his vast network to bring you guests, stories, opinions, predictions, and analysis you won't get anywhere else. Join us for 9 0 9 exec, episode 39 with Justine Benjamin.
Den:
Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of 9 0 9 Exec, your trusted source for executives in tech and all the nonsense that we get up to in the background to try and keep ourselves sane and not lose our shit along this journey. And every episode I get some amazing guests, and today is no different. Justine, Benjamin or b jb, God, I almost got it wrong. That would've been, or Jojo, who's the chief marketing officer at Hex-Rays. Hey, and I got to know you as jojo when we met. So Justine, jump away. Why don't you introduce yourself to everybody?
Justine:
Yeah, no problem. My name's Justine, I would say in the workplace, more often known as jb, a nickname I kind of adopted, oh, I don't know, 15 plus years ago and we were talking about me. We introduced me. Yeah, so I'm the chief marketing officer at Hex-rays. I'm currently based in San Jose, California and Hex-rays itself is actually based out of a small little town in Belgium. So a very interesting time difference in workspace for me there.
Den:
And you are remote working, you're not in Belgium, I'm guessing. I'm not. So why don't you share a little bit about Hex-rays, what is it they do as a company and what does your role entail?
Justine:
Yeah, so Hex-rays is in the cybersecurity space, but within a very niche part of the cybersecurity space. So we create leading binary analysis tools, so really a platform for people to be able to ethically hack or reverse engineer. We were founded in 2005, but I would say the origins of the company started in the nineties. So it's got a really rich history and background and very beloved by the community. When you think about the types of people who use our technology, it's anywhere from your hobbyist who likes to capture the flag contest to somebody who's learning how to maybe reverse engineer a game to get a better cheat code all the way to those very popular three letter acronyms of agencies within the government, both state side and over in Europe as well.
Den:
Yeah, one of them. I may have been in that call with just before this, before we hit the record. And so you're marketing, so what's it like? So, and you've got a seasoned career, which we're going to dig into in a minute, but what's it like marketing this type of technology to this type of audience?
Justine:
It's very different from what I've historically done. This is my first step into cybersecurity. I had a very long history in advertising technology across lots of different types of media. It felt really strongly about my ability to market that As I've come into this area, I would say my role entails talking to all of those customers. So I have kind of what I bucket as my power users. So these could be individuals who may do this for work, may reverse engineer for work, or may just do it fun and maybe they're like a malware analyst or maybe they're in penetration testing, maybe something adjacent to reverse engineering, or I have enterprise customers who are government agencies and bodies and police and law enforcement and things like that. So two different ways that I talk to 'em. The enterprise is very familiar to what I've done before. It's pretty straightforward, no nonsense. Here's the updates, here's how I can serve the fields and the challenges that you're having with the power users. It's heavily community marketing, which I have fallen in love with. It's very different from what I'm used to before, but it's very boots on the ground. It's very casual. It's just really understanding how they're using the technology, what works and what doesn't work. So I'd say it's actually a lot easier. A lot of how we market to the community is just about engagement and just having conversations.
Den:
It's interesting. I was about to ask, before you said enterprises, I was about to ask was it more a B2C play? But it seems like there was a B2C and the B2B, right? So I guess for the audience, actually, if you're watching this podcast, you should bloody know what that is. So shame on you if you don't. So when you're thinking of the marketing, so the B2B stuff, I think of it like there's conferences and then there's LinkedIn and there's ad campaigns and blah, blah, blah, blah, and the B2C, I look at it like there's Reddit, these other platforms. Is that how you actually jump into that?
Justine:
That's how I thought it would be.
Den:
Yeah, so because that's what I thought it would be. So what's the reality?
Justine:
The reality is, and I'm very, very fortunate to have this be the reality of my situation. The reality is everybody knows who we are.
So there's no real brand awareness that needs to happen when we go to a conference. The interesting thing is the product brand is stronger than the corporate brand. So we go to conferences and I say, I'm from X-rays. People are like, and I say, oh I'm, we make ida. Everybody knows that. So that's been a fun project as marketing is starting to tie together the two brands, the product brand and the company brand. But I don't have any brand awareness plays. I would say how I approach the enterprise is really just a matter, it's more product marketing. So it's like here's what comes in the latest release, here are the new add-ons and the plugins that make sense for your specific use cases, whether that's doing malware, whether you're doing, trying to tackle mobile and gaming fraud. It's just really tying features to their challenges there. And that comes through emails and maybe some one-pager. And it's very simple. I've never had a better email open rate in my entire career than I do here.
Den:
Wow.
Justine:
They love it. They open it. I don't spam once a month. Here's everything you need to know. So enterprise is pretty cut and dry and candidly, a lot of the communications happen with the sales team. I don't really manage that. I just make it and hand it all over with the community. That has been very much me much digging my feet in. So we have a lot of platforms. Twitter does the best people have migrated over to Blue Sky, but I think having a blue sky count is more about saying, this is what my political views are versus this is the actual platform I use. And then there's some really niche ones like Mastodon, have you heard of this?
No idea before I got here. But that's also a place where I speak to them. So my B2C power users are very much on my social platforms. They don't open my emails as much, but they have a lot of Google Alert set as well. So anytime I post something on our blog or anytime our website gets an update of some sort, they're on it. So they've almost, I just push out the information and they've chosen where they want it, get it from. And again, the power users are really interested in giving input on how to enhance the product, which we use a lot. It reflects our roadmap significantly in a very good way.
Den:
That's great. Is that speaking to the quality of the product as well as the age of the product and maturity? I mean, does it all come hand in hand?
Justine:
I mean, yeah, I guess you could say that. I mean, I guess to cap off the last question when it comes to ad campaigns, so I came in and I was like, okay, I'm going to talk to my enterprise audience through LinkedIn. That just makes sense. That's what I'm going to do. Total bomb, complete bomb, not a good use of money. And then we were like, okay, let's test Reddit. And so what we wanted to test Reddit was what we find is that our power users are B two Cs maybe aren't financially in the position to purchase the product somebody at a company can do for them. And like I said, a lot of them, this is what they do on the side, but their feedback is, I don't want to say more valuable and say extremely valuable. So we try to do things where we give a heavy discount to an individual like a corporation can back you up. So we found Reddit to be a really good platform to reaching those individuals and being able to get 'em a really cool discount, whether it's on the product or whether it's on online training that we have. So I found that to be very, very beneficial, very cost efficient, extremely cost efficient. So it's good to kind of wrap that up. But
Den:
It's funny, advertising on Twitter and Reddit is way cheaper and I think more visibility than I'd ever get on LinkedIn.
Justine:
Yeah, I'm going to play with advertising on Twitter next quarter to help with our online training courses to see how it goes. Right now our organic reach is pretty insane. It's where everybody has this anyway, so it'll be interesting to see if it gets me any incremental reach.
Den:
And another one for me is TikTok, because one of our plays is a platform for students, so we're trying to encourage students to sign up, it's free for them to sign up, but tiktoks where a lot of the young kids hang out. So there's that. And then Discords the other one, but I haven't spent many minutes in the Discord. So for me, my son's there all the time. My daughter's there a lot, and I'm like, eh, not my shit.
Justine:
I looked into Discord advertising and it's not your traditional advertising, which is fine. It's really content driven and really community driven. So it could be a good play. But I'm a team of one and a half currently, so we're just kind of
Den:
Yeah, me too.
Justine:
Stay focused
Den:
On my marketing. Me too.
Yeah. Hey folks, just want to take a minute to say thanks for listening to the show, watching the show, however you engage with us. If you're liking the conversations, if you think we're adding some value, we'd love you to subscribe and share the show with your friends. If you know of anyone else that would benefit ideally for us, that will help us be able to grow the show, invest more in the quality, get some more exciting guests, and keep bringing you some executive goodness. Thanks everybody. Take it easy and enjoy the rest of the discussion. So let's talk a little bit about, you've led marketing teams for a number of years, so before here ads wiz, and Kayden, you were in there. So what got you into marketing the young Justine at high school? What did you really want to do when you grew up?
Justine:
I really wanted to be a teacher and I really thought I was going to be a teacher. And I think as I got older, I dunno why I remember this, but I remember just being in a car and seeing a billboard and it was a really witty play on words for the brand, no idea what the brand is, but I just remember it being really witty and being like, that's really cool. Could I do that? And my dad at the time is, I think that's marketing. So I think that kind of planted the seed. I was really on a trajectory to be in healthcare and the administrative side of it, just kind of by proxy of my mom. My mom gave me and all my siblings, our first jobs in doctor's offices and hospitals. That's kind of the path my sister took. My brother took an adjacent path through a connection through the hospital. And this is a funny story. I had a friend who was an exotic dancer
Den:
In San Jose, perhaps
Justine:
In the area. And no judgment. Listen, that's hard work.
Den:
Yeah, it's hard work.
Justine:
And one of their customers was visiting, patronizing the business and asked her, Hey, do you need a job? And she was like, I have a job. We're literally at my job. And she's like,
Den:
Why? You're visiting me at work? Shit, fuck.
Justine:
And he's like, I know somebody who's looking for a Swiss Army knife, like an office manager, but they have to have some finance background and some other backgrounds. And they go, well, actually I have a friend who's looking for a job. And it was me at the time. I was looking for a job. And I was like, I don't know how I feel about this. And so I was like, okay, I send my resume. They were surprised that my resume matched and we met at a coffee shop and just hit it off. And it was exactly what I was looking for at the time and what they were looking for at the time. So at 17 years old, I started working at my first startup. It was in the semiconductor industry and it was like a two-prong approach for how they did business. It was an engineering consultant agency.
So where they put out engineers to companies like Synopsis and Cadence. And then they also, those engineers that were consulting out there on the side built an automated verification tool to check in your work. And then we would sell that as part of consultancy. We'd be like, Hey, you like this engineer? You like what they're doing? By the way, we also have software you can purchase. So I was the office manager, I was the executive assistant. I helped the CEO with all the finances and billings. I built the website when that was my first dip and tasting
Den:
Your 17-year-old jojo sitting there, Swiss army knife website building included. So how did you get from there into the marketing game?
Justine:
So I was there for about two years and then I ended up working following one of the executives to another company and then they needed somebody to do that plus marketing assistance. And so that just kind of bled into there where I would help out with marketing and events. And then another mutual friend of ours perhaps was working at another technology company and they were looking for an executive assistant. And I was like, I happened to be wanting to get out of my current job and I kind of stepped away and I was doing weight loss consulting and listening. Just got to pay the bills sometimes when you're going to school. And they were looking for an executive assistant. So I went there with my tech chops of an executive assistant as well. And then just, it was an environment where they were open to letting you expand. And I said, look, I dipped my toes in a marketing before I really like it. They're like, great. And so I started working underneath the director of marketing and then just slowly built and acquired skills after that. And I think it started off with events, it went to pr, went into product marketing and just kind of built, I think strategically or whether by my preference in work environments, I choose young companies, scale up companies, companies that have a lot of room to grow. So where I can just kind of spread.
Den:
And it's interesting because as you've been growing your career, what advice do you have for someone who's trying to break into marketing now? I mean, if they're fresh out of school, and quite often I think sometimes they'll leave school and they'll have done some random business thing. Actually, my daughter, she's doing business with a minor in media, so when she leaves, it's like she doesn't really know what she wants to do. So if you've got something like that and they're all of a sudden they're like, oh, I really want to do marketing, how do you advise these young kids that they get started? What's a,
Justine:
Yeah, no, that's a great question. And I have asked that question myself and I will modify the answer I was originally given with my own experience. So I think there's two paths to if you really want to dive in and excel and get into marketing and say perhaps be a marketing leader, one is kind of the master of a specific trade. If your heart is in digital marketing or advertising, marketing, things like that, find it, stick to it, own it, and just be the best at it. And if that's kind of the course that you want to take, say maybe you just want to be a director of product marketing or a director in digital marketing, got to do that. You got to own it. You got to know everything. The other path is if you're looking to be more of a CMO or a head of marketing, it's the generalist approach where it's kind of like, I don't want to say a master of none, but a very seasoned expert at many things.
And that would be start with a discipline that really interests you when you come out. Things that are easy to do these days is digital marketing or content marketing, things like that. Those are things that are high in demand and kind of build up a few years of experience in that and then see where else you can grow within the company. So you're starting to build your portfolio across the board. You don't have to be a master at everything if you want to be ahead of marketing, but I'm going to say at least 60 to 70% of that.
Den:
And generally, you would've probably have been a master at one of the disciplines. I mean by the time you get to the CMO level, you had to have ran through the ranks usually, right? I mean, otherwise you're just a leader of something and lucky enough to end up doing the marketing shit. So somehow you probably went through the ranks, right?
Justine:
Yeah, for sure. I definitely went through the ranks. I don't want to say clawed, but I climbed. It was a long climb. I actually don't have an education in marketing. So everything that I have and everywhere that I'm at today is through experience and through learning on the job and learning outside of the job, reading a lot, teaching myself.
Den:
Yeah, and I think, well, so then there's the thing that goes into the side of the hustle, the grit, the determination, the desire to be successful. I mean, I am one of the rare people in my industry that doesn't have a degree, and I meet so many people that are educated through the wazoo. It's like, okay, well I ran enterprise security and Adobe as my last big job. Well, actually Cisco, I ran enterprise security there. That was my last big job. And then I went to startup and then I was their CSO and ran security in it. And I still don't have a degree. I feel it hasn't held me back because I think I've compensated for the grit determination, the street smarts, the eq. So that's helped. But I think it's funny, right in the journey, in the path, when you reflect back on your one, is there any move that you wish you had done that you regret? Or is there anything Yeah, I'll stop there. That's an easy question or a loaded one.
Justine:
Regrets. I'll tell you what I'm going to do, which I'm pretty good at. I'm going to give you one final answer from the previous question. And while I'm giving you that answer, I'm going to think about a regret.
So the last advice, which ties into what you said that you and I have in common, which is not having a degree or even a degree in the discipline in which we're working in. When I look back and I think about, yeah, it was grit, but my husband has to remind me or he tells me I'm an overachiever. I'm not aware of that at all. I don't think that I am. I think I just like work. It gives me my dopamine boost. It just feeds me. I feel fulfilled for it. I like doing things with my brain. So work naturally works really well with me. But one of the things that I've had to look at and how you grow or advance, and those could be two separate trajectories, you can still grow. If you never want to be a leader and you never want to manage people, that's totally fine.
You still can grow. But I think the thing that you need to have, or the trait and the advice that we give is to not shy away from asking questions. And when you do that, you do it to everybody benefits. So it's the person you're in a situation with, they see that there's no hubris involved. I'm just trying to get down to the problem. I just want to do the best job I can. I don't care if it's a stupid question, I don't care if it's complex question. They're both questions that are going to help me get to where I need to get. And I think what it also does is it shows your team or people around you who may be in more junior positions that it is okay to ask questions. So that would be advice that I would give to anybody in addition to where they're looking at. Perfect. So there's that regret.
Den:
I know while you were answering the last question at the back of your brain, you're like, oh shit,
Justine:
Okay. This isn't a copout. I swear to you this isn't a cop out, but I firmly believe that every single decision that I have made has led me to exactly where I'm at right now. And I'm very satisfied with where I'm at right now.
Den:
Yeah, well that's a beautiful answer. The thing in life, I try and tell people, you actually shouldn't have any regrets.
Justine:
Yeah. I mean I doubt
Den:
Unless your life absolutely sucks and your a miserable get, which some people are. But I look at it, I'm an optimist, so I look at decisions I could have made along my journey that may have resulted in a different or better outcome, maybe financially, emotionally or whatever, whatever. But I never looked back with regret. I look back and recognize I learned those were opportunities to grow.
Justine:
And I a hundred percent agree. And for me, if I do have regret or whatever is close to regret to me, oh, are we back?
Den:
Yep. Keep going. Oh yeah. We'll probably need to have the editor cut that little slice down.
Justine:
Okay. Yeah. Yeah. No, I'm not a fan of regret. I'm not a fan of stress either. I try not to do that. Some people don't like broccoli. I don't like regret or stress. I just try not.
Den:
Yeah. So it is funny. Yeah, it's funny for me, I look at it, I think it's important to recognize in life, you can always look back in reflection. Hindsight's a wonderful thing, but the reality is in life, you make the best decisions you can at the time with the information you've got in the circumstances you're in. And I think that's vital, especially in business. And the other thing for me was, I read this somewhere, I can't remember where now, but someone said a decision which is easy to be changed or changeable should be made quicker than the decision that's unable to be changed. So if you make the decision and that thing cannot be changed, I mean, having the baby's a good one, it's pretty hard to stuff those suckers back in once they're born. So that is a big decision, right? But buying the furniture that's in our rooms right now shouldn't be the hardest decision in business. A marketing campaign isn't a hard decision.
Justine:
No. Had a great cancellation period.
Den:
Yeah, it shouldn't just don't sign up for 10 years of the same share.
Justine:
Exactly. Right. You subscribe, have good cancellation policy. So what you were saying too about the decision and the timeframe, so I don't remember if I read this was relationship advice or something, but I apply it to everything in my life, which is if you have an emotional response to a situation, don't respond for 24 hours, sit with it. And then 24 hours later, if you still feel that way, say something about it. But do not wait. Do not go past 48 hours.
Den:
Yeah. Or sometimes people would say, send the email to yourself because not everything needs said. I try and give that advice to my kids. I try and remember that actually my son had a school situation going on, and I think the school teacher in specific was singling him out and pretty much I shot an email off to them and said some basic stuff, but kept it really all pretty productive. And my son was like, but you never called out this. You never called out that you never called out. And there was five or six things that was pretty egregious that I'm like, oh fuck, it doesn't matter. And I said, look, I said, either way, mate, I went, she has it in for you. It doesn't matter whether we list out the five things that were wrong about her statements or her thing. And for me in life, sometimes I think in leadership, this is absolutely vital. You do not always have to have the last word. You do not always have to be right. And you do not have to crucify everybody that screws you over.
Justine:
No, yeah, for sure.
Den:
Choose your battles wisely. And you don't need to win it all because at the end of the day, sometimes you just antagonize things more and make stressful situations even worse. And the other thing is you don't know what kind of day they're having. Maybe they're having the worst day in their life and they don't need to tell you that shit. So I'm not going to try and crucify a teacher because she's been an asshole with my kid. Maybe it's just not her best moment or whatever. And at the end of it, and it was funny, this was future Farmers of America, and I'm like, well, son, I went, do you plan to be a farmer when you're older? That's not what you told me. You want your career to be, I win. So maybe we just get you out that class. It doesn't matter. And I think in leadership, I think it's really important. Now, the funny thing that Dan, 10 years ago or 20 years ago, anybody who's watching us now that reported to me 20 years ago would be like, he's an asshole. So I think there's a level of maturity that comes over time, for sure,
Justine:
A hundred percent. So I think I started managing at the weight loss center. I think I was in my twenties and most of my employees were 18 to 20 women. And so the amount of hormones and the general environment there was just insane and great and very beautiful, but also could be very challenging at times. And I told my husband when he first started managing, I don't know how long ago, and he was like, well, this is hard. I was like, guess what? He's like, what? I'm like, you're a shit manager for the first year. Guarantee it. I don't care who you are, you're horrible. There's just too much involved. I'm like, and the next year you get better and you learn and you start to learn mistakes the hard way. And then by the third year you're starting to get really hit your stride and get more into it. But anybody who's starting off leading a team or managing, just do the best you can. Make sure nobody dies and make it to the first year. Very much like parenting. Just keep 'em alive, keep them fed and paid for the first year. But it definitely grows. It definitely develops
Also
Den:
Now, because I know you're a mother with two young children, you've got a husband, you're juggling life, you're juggling work. So what are the tips or tricks that you've got that you use to keep you sane while trying to juggle all this shit?
Justine:
For me personally, I think my DNA and my makeup is a little different. I can drive myself into the ground and not be aware of it. So I think for me and any individuals like me, it's important to have people around you who can be your tether and who can also be really straight with you and be like, you're not happy. This sucks. You're stressed because I can just be so consumed and all or nothing. So I think that's one. Two, as far as how do you keep sane? I think it's having an honest conversation about is it my personality traits or is it my environment? And if you can establish that are things that you have control over, then it's like parenting. It's trial and error. You just pull up a blog, ask chat GPT for some tips and tricks, and you find what works works for me is not forcing myself to push through when my brain needs a break. If I'm sitting here and I don't, don't break, this is it. I'm here. Everybody else is on the other side of the world. So if I finish a task and I am just kind of sitting here and my brain's just kind of spinning or not knowing to do next, instead of forcing myself to get through, nope, stand up, walk away.
I forgot what it's called. But there's lots of different methods for that where it could be as truncated as 25 minutes of productivity, five minutes break. I tend to go through more of a natural flow and more task oriented. So I'm like, okay, I'm going to finish this one thing, get this out the door, and then I'm going to go do some dishes. I'm going to put a load of laundry in. I'm going to go walk the dog. And while I'm out there doing those tasks, those mundane physical tasks like I was doing with that question, then my brain's already starting to work on the next task and figuring it out. And so by the time I sit down, I've already formulated basically a full draft of maybe what I need to work on. So I think really acknowledging how you work and when you need breaks and not forcing yourself to power through just because they got to power through. No.
I think that's important. And vacation,
Den:
Like real vacation where you're not working the whole time.
Justine:
Yes. Sign off, take your vacation. So yeah, so I'd say have a tether and somebody honest in your life. Understand your work spurts and your work breaks and when you need them, and then really step away because more of an exaggerated version of what you're doing day to day. You're having work spurts and you're taking a break. You need the macroscopic point of that where you have a long amount of work and you need a longer amount of break on vacation.
Den:
Yeah. And I mean, I think just the whole burnout thing during COVID, then a lot of people really woke up and realized, and then actually, I was in a round table session this morning that I was presenting at, and one of the things I talked about was this burnout. And a lot of people I think realized, why are we killing ourselves for this? And half these companies will lay you off in a minute without thinking about it. They don't give a shit. So it's very strange that over our careers, we kill ourselves for this company or any company that doesn't give a shit. And you've got young kids that are grown up that don't get to see their parents because we're doing the 60 hour week. So ied, when I left Cisco, not that Cisco was a bad place like that, but I certainly had a role and a responsibility where I was working 16 hours a day and it wasn't all productive work. That's the thing. The bigger the company, the more bureaucracy and bullshit you deal with.
Justine:
Oh, the meetings, I had six hours of meetings a day at my last company and was supposed to do two to three jobs because they kept having to downsize and trim. And I wrote COVID here as well. I would say since COVID, it just went pear shaped progressively. And I think the progression was so subtle that again, it's me, I didn't know, but it got to the point where my kids would bring home a Mother's Day project and my mom's good at work or my mom, everything, all these things and how they viewed me or when they would draw pictures of me, it was sitting at this desk and those were the tethers and those were the reality checks that I needed. So I actually quit my last job, and which went through a lot of changes. I stayed through two different acquisitions and just kept taking more work after each acquisition. And when I just quit, I didn't have anything else lined up. I said, I'm going to leave it up to the universe. And I went to the doctor. I knew I was physically killing myself, and I came back with three different diagnoses that was not okay because of what was happening with
Den:
My health. One was probably crazy for putting up with all the bullshit.
Justine:
Yeah, man. I managed, it wasn't a large team, it was about a dozen people. And as a mother, as a parent, it's also an emotional burden that you carry when you manage people as well.
Den:
But it's interesting. Yeah, because the bigger your team, bigger your organization, and I tell people this all the time, it's less about technology leadership quite often it's about glorified babysitting of adults and really their burdens and their problems are challenges that you also have to deal with. And the higher up the organization you go, the less fun conversations you have. It's usually always the bad news. It's always
Speaker 4:
The
Den:
Drama dramas and the escalations. So yeah. Now I know we're up on time, but I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you your opinion on how you think AI is going to change the world of marketing.
Justine:
Well, I'll tell you how it's changing my world.
Den:
Yeah,
Justine:
No, how I think it's going to change the world of marketing. I think we are. Okay, I'll relate it to weightlifting. We're currently in a bulk phase right now. We're at, does that make sense? Right. We're trying to put on the pounds. We're trying to get as much as we need with it. Maybe, I don't know if weightlifting to carry this analogy through, but I'm going to try. Okay, keep
Den:
Going, keep going. Do one more. I think this will probably be the humorous part of the show.
Justine:
No, but I think where we are with AI specifically in marketing right now is that everybody's trying to use it as much as they possibly can and to let it take over as much of their work as they can. There's good and there's bad. And I think what AI does is it is almost like natural selection. If you're somebody who knows your job really well and can do it, but maybe you're under resourced because they've had three different layoffs and maybe you don't have somebody do their remedial work, you can use AI as a marketer to get rid of the bs, right? Or at least to do a first draft. So here, for example, we have a product release coming up. I have my release notes from the engineers, I have the messaging notes from my product, and then I just build an outline. I build an outline, I put it in there. I guess I'm looking for more LLM versus ai, but still
I have the meat of my source material. I'll throw it into some LLM and then it'll spit back to me some ideas. That's all I need. Just something to get me into first gear, the hardest you need to do, get into first gear and then I'm done. I go through, I clean it up, I know what I want, I know what I don't want and it saves hours of time. So I think if you have somebody who knows their job, knows what they want and just needs a little help with that, it's very successful. People who dunno their job, dunno what they want and fully rely on AI or LLMs are not going to last and they're not going to survive. I still don't think it's ever going to take away that aspect of it. There's just decisions that it can't make. It could be a sounding board for you. So anyways, long way of saying we're bulking right now, we're using it and consuming it as much as we possibly can, but we're going to get to the point where we're going to see that the end result still isn't as good as what a machine and a human can do together. And then we'll start cutting. Is that right? Is that the right term? Yeah,
Den:
Yeah, yeah. Boom. Trimming down or something.
Justine:
There you go.
Den:
Do you think this guy's a weightlifter? The only gym I know of, there's usually a guy that I'd go to the bar with probably.
Justine:
Yeah. So I think it's just another piece of technology that we're going to over consume and then eventually the dust will settle and we'll see where it has its place. But I personally haven't been able, it will never take the place of a full human.
Den:
I've got sessions that I've been in where I've seen people set up hosts of agents in sales, marketing and other technical roles to really orchestrate and automate tasks and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's very elaborate, but to your point, it still requires someone to understand what that process, what that workflow, what that good looks like, so that the checks and balances and you can really kick things off in a way that has some level of direction. So yeah. No, that's brilliant. What else I want to close with? Let me see if you had one piece of advice for women in technology. So I don't always like to jump into the pure women trying to do their careers and shit here, but I do recognize, and I do try to bring in more women into our show because I think there's an imbalance, but so if you had one advice for women in technology that are working with male leaders, something that helps 'em be success, what would that be?
Justine:
I thought about this, I thought about it in a different way that you're phrasing.
Den:
No, you can even change one thing in life. You're allowed to change the question and give me a rephrased question with a better answer.
Justine:
So I as a woman, as a woman without a degree, as a woman of color,
I have found challenges throughout my career, but maybe not oddly or maybe against the status quo, my challenges have actually been with other women and other cohorts of women. And that didn't happen until later in my career. So I'm going to give a little bit more of a background and then I'm going to answer the question. So for me, growing up and growing in the tech field, most of my advocates and mentors were men. And I don't know if that's a nature of being in technology because it's just predominantly men or what in my personal life, I do have very strong female relationships, but I also have, I kind of hang with the dudes more. It just tends to be more of what I'm interested in, tend to be a little bit nerdy in my personal interest, which a lot of women don't not, there is a lot of,
Den:
Well, our mutual friend that we met through is probably one of the nerdiest, smartest, smartest guys I've ever met. And when he talks to me, I'm sitting there trying to keep up
Justine:
And he's my best mate,
Den:
You hang, he's your best mate.
Justine:
And we are. I mean if you were to look at the text messages that we were sharing yesterday, we were literally listing out and I'm reading this and I'm watching this and this, and it's all like, these are the things that we're doing. Okay. So that aside, so my advice is a replication or duplicate of what I said before. I think as a woman, whether you're with other women or men, it goes back to asking questions. And I would say my advice in no matter what situation you're in, is to be able to have, it's a super human power to ask a question. It is not a weakness. And if you feel like you're in a situation where somebody you feel like they might demean you because you're asking questions, I have this saying where I give advice to people where if they don't know how to bring up the subject, the first thing you say is, I don't know how to bring this up, but here we go. And the same thing with questions. You could say something like, Hey, I've got a handful of questions. Some may be complicated, some may be simple. So you're just kind of prefacing it. So when you have confidence in the types of questions that you ask, it makes your job easier, makes their job easier. And I think that really helps as being a woman. Definitely. And I guess the second piece of advice that I would give is, and this may be controversial, I think it's very important,
Den:
We like controversy in this show.
Justine:
I think it's very important to have your female tribe. I think it's complicated sometimes for certain types of women. So I would say be very open to who can be a mentor and an advocate for you. It doesn't always have to be a woman and it doesn't always have to be somebody the same ethnic background or those are things that help us find commonality. But if those are a challenge, I would say yeah, be open to who and also who you can advocate and who you can be there for
Den:
As well. And that's really because I think for me, I mean I've had female and male mentors
And I think what's important actually is to recognize you can have different mentors for different things that you're trying to grow in. It's not one mentor or two mentors. It can be many mentors. And then the other thing is to recognize that you also can be a mentor no matter where you are in your journey. Because I look at it like I offer help to mentor people now, but I've always offered to give advice to people bloody probably when I was five. I'm sure my parents, I'm like, why are you doing that? But I think the reality is in our life and our career, we have the ability to lift others up as we are lifting ourselves up too. So I think as a mentor, it should be understood by people who are mentors or consider themselves mentors. That the mentee has the ability also to mentor the mentor.
Speaker 4:
So
Den:
I look at it like I'm going to learn something from anybody I mentor and I have done. And I still have relationships with people that I met 20 years ago in that mentor capacity and it's great. So excellent. Hey Justin, I really appreciate your time. I know we're gone four minutes, so I dunno, I'd never count the time. Actually, I don't give a shit if the conversation's good and people are going to learn something and it's a little entertaining. It's brilliant for me. So look, really appreciate your time everybody. Justine Benjamin, she is a chief marketing officer at Hex Rays and you should all know what that is. If not, the links will be in the show notes. So Justin, thank you very much.
Justine:
Thank you, Den. I'll see you soon.
Den:
Thank you. Bye.
Narrator:
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